The English Department is committed to improving student writing, both for majors and non-majors. Our First-Year Writing Program offers courses in college writing, and starting in Fall 2016 will offer courses in argumentative writing and critical thinking, technical writing, and professional and business writing. In addition, English Department faculty contribute expertise to the university's Writing Proficiency Exam, help prepare faculty in other disciplines to teach writing, and offers courses in essay writing, writing studies, and writing pedagogy at both the undergraduate and graduate level.

Announcements

The deadline to apply for the Master of Arts program in English for Fall 2018 is March 15, 2018.

Applying to the Graduate Program in English requires two separate applications: one for admission to graduate study at the CSU and one for admission to the Master of Arts degree program in English. Both applications must be approved. To be considered, applicants must do the following:

1. Apply for admission to graduate study at Cal State LA by completing and submitting an online application through CSUApply. As part of the application for admission to graduate study, the applicant must request that official copies of all required transcripts be mailed directly to the Cal State L.A. Office of Graduate Studies from the institution(s) attended.

2. Apply for admission to the Master of Arts program in the Department of English by completing a Departmental Application for Admission and submitting it along with a writing sample to the department. For the writing sample, please submit an analytical essay on a literary topic. The writing sample should be an essay written for a previous undergraduate (or graduate) course, not original work written for the purpose of applying to the program. While the sample should be at least five pages, please note that no special consideration will be given to longer papers. (Students who were not English or literature majors can substitute an analytical, critical, or research paper on a non-literary topic.)

Notification of Decision

Applicants will received two notifications: one indicates whether they have been admitted to graduate status at Cal State LA by the Office of Admissions, the other indicates whether they have been admitted specifically by the Department of English. Generally, an applicant will receive notification from the Cal State L.A. Office of Admissions first, followed by notification from the Department of English. Regardless of the order of notification, an applicant is admitted to the Graduate Program in English only by the Department of English.

Admissions Overview

Generally, to be considered for admission to the Graduate Program in English, applicants must:

have completed a four-year college course of study and hold a baccalaureate degree in English (or a closely related field) from an institution accredited by a regional accrediting association, or shall have completed equivalent academic preparation as determined by appropriate campus authorities;

be in good academic standing at the last college or university attended;

have attained a grade point average of at least 3.2 (A = 4.0) in their English major.

Applicants who meet the above conditions but whose undergraduate degrees are in fields other than English can apply for admission to the graduate program in English. Such students, however, must complete a 24-unit program of upper division prerequisites (which might include courses previously taken) prior to beginning their graduate work. For more on the 24-unit requirement for non-English B.A. students seeking an M.A. degree in English, click here.

Please note that admission to the Graduate Program in English is competitive and meeting the minimum application requirements does not guarantee admission.

Under special circumstances, students who do not meet the department’s minimum requirements might be considered for admission. The Graduate Admissions Committee might consider the following additional criteria when reviewing applications from students who do not meet the minimum GPA requirement: GRE scores, the student's undergraduate institution, and specific courses completed at the undergraduate and graduate level.

Henri Coulette at the Huntington Library, Nov 11th

The work of Henri Coulette will be celebrated at the Huntington Library on November 11 (2 pm), with a reading of The War of the Secret Agents, his award-winning book of poems from 1966. Readers will include Timothy Steele, Jacqueline Coulette, Peter Brier, Robert Mezey, and Peter Everwine.

Entering its 68th year of publication, Statement Magazine is California State University, Los Angeles’s student-run journal of literature and art. Students gain valuable professional and educational experience by assuming responsibility for all aspects of producing this magazine and learning many new skills. Major national and international writers and artists appear in its pages alongside talented creative students, many of whom have gone on to become highly respected figures themselves.

Statement’s pages have been graced by U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove and Los Angeles’s first Poet Laureate Eloise Klein Healy, along with countless others including Wanda Coleman, Charles Bukowski, Ai, Luis Rodriguez, Carolyn See and Sesshu Foster. Statement has also been distinguished with national recognition.

In 2008, the magazine received the National Program Director’s Prize in Content from the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, competing against the literary magazines of 400 other universities.

Statement Magazine is affiliated with California State University, Los Angeles. All rights reserved.

This book explores an archive of modernist literature that conceives survival as a collective enterprise linking lives across boundaries of race, time, class, species, gender, and sexuality. As social Darwinism promoted a selfish, competitive, and combatively individualistic understanding of survival, the four modernists examined here countered by imagining how postures of precarity, vulnerability, and receptivity can breed pleasurably and environmentally sustainable modes of interdependent survival. These modes prove particularly vital and appealing to queer bodies, desires, and intimacies deemed unfit, abnormal, or unproductive by heterosexist ideologies. Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle” opposes “survival of the fittest” doctrines and Progressive-era masculinity with a feminist-inspired cultivation of ecological humility and interspecies collaboration. Oscar Wilde develops an autobiographical form that expresses collective subjectivity in De Profundis, an epistolary testament to the constitutive role of suffering in queer community formation. E.M. Forster imagines, in Howards End, how queer ideas and intimacies survive courtesy of invitations that awaken both inviters and invitees to unexpected relational possibilities freed from conventional timelines of development and realization. In Forster’s A Passage to India, the pursuit of “queer invitations” models an evolutionary succession defined by careful attention to creaturely inheritance and by ethical responses to the countless lives, including those obfuscated by imperial privilege, required for the successful survival of any individual life. Finally, Willa Cather’s short and long fiction, including “Consequences,” Lucy Gayheart, and The Professor’s House, argues for suicide as a way of life as it transforms the impulse to throw life away into an ethical alternative to the greedy logics of capitalism.

Benjamin Bateman, Ph.D.

Associate Professor, English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Director, Center for the Study of Genders and Sexualities

Cal State Los Angeles

Author of The Modernist Art of Queer Survival (forthcoming from Oxford University Press)